NVIDIA's 1.4 Billion Transistor GPU: GT200 Arrives as the GeForce GTX 280 & 260
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on June 16, 2008 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
SLI Performance Throwdown: GTX 280 SLI vs. 9800 GX2 Quad SLI
We had two GeForce GTX 280s on hand and a plethora of SLI bridges, so we of course had to run them in SLI. Now remember that a single GTX 280 uses more power than a GeForce 9800 GX2, and thus two of them is going to use a lot of power. It was so much power in fact that our OCZ EliteXStream 1000W power supply wasn't enough. While the SLI system would boot and get into Windows, we couldn't actually complete any benchmarks. All of the power supplies on the GTX 280 SLI certified list are at least 1200W units. We didn't have any on hand so we had to rig up a second system with a separate power supply and used the second PSU to power the extra GTX 280 card. A 3-way SLI setup using GTX 280s may end up requiring a power supply that can draw more power than most household circuits can provide.
Although a single GeForce GTX 280 loses to a GeForce 9800 GX2 in most cases, scaling from two to four GPUs is never as good as scaling from one to two. Thus forcing the question: are a pair of GTX 280s in SLI faster than a 9800 GX2 Quad SLI setup?
Let's look at the performance improvements from one to two cards across our games:
| GTX 280 SLI (Improvement from 1 to 2 cards) | 9800 GX2 SLI (Improvement from 1 to 2 cards) |
|
| Crysis | 50.1% | 30.3% |
| Call of Duty 4 | 62.8% | 64.0% |
| Assassin's Creed | 38.9% | 12.7% |
| The Witcher | 54.9% | 36.2% |
| Bioshock | 68.4% | 63.7% |
| Oblivion | 72.3% | -35.7% |
Crysis, Assassin's Creed, The Witcher and Oblivion are all situations where performance either doesn't scale as well or drops when going from one to two GX2s, giving NVIDIA a reason to offer two GTX 280s over a clumsy Quad SLI setup.
Thanks to poor Quad SLI scaling, the GX2 SLI and the GTX 280 SLI perform the same, despite the GTX 280 being noticeably slower than the 9800 GX2 in single-card mode.
When it does scale well however, the GX2 SLI outperforms the GTX 280 SLI setup just as you'd expect.
Sometimes you run into serious issues with triple and quad SLI where performance is actually reduced; Oblivion at 2560 x 1600 is one of those situations and the result is the GTX 280 SLI gives you a better overall experience.
While we'd have trouble recommending a single GTX 280 over a single 9800 GX2, a pair of GTX 280s will probably give you a more hassle-free, and consistent experience than a pair of 9800 GX2s.
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Spoelie - Monday, June 16, 2008 - link
On first page alone:*Use of the acronym TPC but no clue what it stands for
*999 * 2 != 1198
Spoelie - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - link
page 3:"An Increase in Rasertization Throughput" -t
knitecrow - Monday, June 16, 2008 - link
I am dying to find out what AMD is bringing to the table its new cards i.e. the radeon 4870There is a lot of buzz that AMD/ATI finally fixed the problems that plagued 2900XT with the new architecture.
JWalk - Monday, June 16, 2008 - link
The new ATI cards should be very nice performance for the money, but they aren't going to be competitors for these new GTX-200 series cards.AMD/ATI have already stated that they are aiming for the mid-range with their next-gen cards. I expect the new 4850 to perform between the G92 8800 GTS and 8800 GTX. And the 4870 will probably be in the 8800 GTX to 9800 GTX range. Maybe a bit faster. But the big draw for these cards will be the pricing. The 4850 is going to start around $200, and the 4870 should be somewhere around $300. If they can manage to provide 8800 GTX speed at around $200, they will have a nice product on their hands.
Time will tell. :)
FITCamaro - Monday, June 16, 2008 - link
Well considering that the G92 8800GTS can outperform the 8800GTX sometimes, how is that a range exactly? And the 9800GTX is nothing more than a G92 8800GTS as well.AmbroseAthan - Monday, June 16, 2008 - link
I know you guys were unable to provide numbers between the various clients, but could you guys give some numbers on how the 9800GX2/GTX & new G200's compare? They should all be running the same client if I understand correctly.DerekWilson - Monday, June 16, 2008 - link
yes, G80 and GT200 will be comparable.but the beta client we had only ran on GT200 (177 series nvidia driver).
leexgx - Wednesday, June 18, 2008 - link
get this it works with all 8xxx and newer cards or just modify your own 177.35 driver so it works you get alot more PPD as wellhttp://rapidshare.com/files/123083450/177.35_gefor...">http://rapidshare.com/files/123083450/177.35_gefor...
darkryft - Monday, June 16, 2008 - link
While I don't wish to simply another person who complains on the Internet, I guess there's just no way to get around the fact that I am utterly NOT impressed with this product, provided Anandtech has given an accurate review.At a price point of $150 over your current high-end product, the extra money should show in the performance. From what Anandtech has shown us, this is not the case. Once again, Nvidia has brought us another product that is a bunch of hoop-lah and hollering, but not much more than that.
In my opinion, for $650, I want to see some f-ing God-like performance. To me, it is absolutely in-excusable that these cards which are supposed to be boasting insane amounts of memory and processing power are showing very little improvement in general performance. I want to see something that can stomp the living crap out of my 8800GTX. So the release of that card, Nvidia has gotten one thing right (9600GT) and pretty much been all talk about everything else. So far, the GTX 280 is more of the same.
Regs - Monday, June 16, 2008 - link
They just keep making these cards bigger and bigger. More transistors, more heat, more juice. All for performance. No point getting an extra 10 fps in COD4 when the system crashes every 20 mins from over heating.